I’m a technology journalist and currently write for websites such as bit-tech.net and magazines such as Custom PC and Computer Active. I’ve been building and modifying PCs for 20 years and writing about them for over six years. I’ve reviewed countless pieces of hardware and peripherals and also have a passion for all things tech - from Microsoft Windows to Apple iOS, PC gaming to iPhone jailbreaking. I’ll be offering guides, tips and insights into current and future trends, PC tweaking, the weird and wonderful world of PC modding and plenty of gadget-orientated articles.

Top Five Laptop And Macbook Upgrades From Just $10

An SSD such as Crucial's M500 is the best upgrade you can give to your laptop

Do you own a laptop that’s showing its age performance-wise? Perhaps you’ve recently bought one and are still cradling it like a new-born baby to prevent it getting scratched. Whatever your situation, with all the hype around tablets and smartphones, it’s easy to forget that millions of us use laptops or Apple Macbooks regularly too.

In fact, they’re usually far more productive devices than their touchscreen-only cousins but are also subjected to a lot of misuse by way of dropping, scratching and all-manner of other abuse.

There are a number of ways you can protect a new laptop against drops and scrapes. You can also give an old one a substantial speed boost so don’t reach for your wallet to buy a new one just yet. Some upgrades cost less than a packet of cigarettes too so there’s something here for all budgets and you don’t need to be a PC geek to know how to install them either.

1. Replace the hard disk with an SSD

To start with is perhaps the best upgrade you can made to any laptop – fitting a solid state disk or SSD. The mechanical hard disk in your laptop is slow, fragile and nearly always the bottleneck in terms of its performance. It’s much slower than those in a PC for the simple reason it has to be smaller and less power-hungry.

Many every-day tasks from loading programs, switching between them and even booting into the operating system (OS) (Windows or OSX) are all affected by the speed your laptop’s hard disk can read and write data. I also mentioned they’re fragile – a single drop even from knee-height onto a hard surface can render a hard disk useless.

So what is an SSD and why is it so much better? For starters an SSD has no moving parts, so it’s not going to break if you drop your laptop – a huge benefit to those on the move. SSDs are generally less power-hungry than hard disks too, so your laptop’s battery will last longer. However, the speed boost is phenomenal – everything from booting into Windows or OSX to general system responsiveness is vastly improved and in many cases it can feel like a totally different machine.

Installing an SSD is relatively straightforward

Replacing your laptop’s hard disk with an SSD is usually pretty easy and some even come with cloning tools so you don’t need to reinstall your operating system. Price-wise there is one little catch. Per gigabyte, SSDs aren’t as good value as hard disks so many people opt for smaller sizes such as 128GB and 256GB – typcially a lot less than your typical laptop hard disk. However, if you filling a hard disk over 50 per cent, and it will quickly begin to slow down.

Thankfully, SSDs suffer far less from this and they’re falling in price all the time too. For example 120GB models such as Crucial’s M500- which is big enough for your operating system, games, programs and little storage – retail for less than $120 while more substancial 480GB models will set you back closer to $350.

To install an SSD, you just need to locate your laptop’s hard disk cover or remove the rear casing. It’s worth searching online if you’re not sure as there are heaps of guides for specific models on how to do just this. Remove your hard disk, install the SSD and away you go.

From there, you’ll either need to install a fresh copy of your operating system (well worth doing if you haven’t done it for a couple of years to clear out the garbage) or copy your disk clone back using the software you used to create it (companies such as Acronis offers software that does this). In any event, copy important files to an external device first as a backup. Crucial has lots of instructional videos in its YouTube Channel.

Most laptops have a convenient memory slot cover that provides quick access to the memory modules

2. Install more memory

Your laptop’s memory or RAM is different to the storage provided by a hard disk or SSD. It provides space for active files and programs to run and be accessed at super fast speeds and can help to make programs and your operating system run faster and be more responsive. It’s relatively cheap too and for less than £30 you could even double the amount you have at the moment.

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